Well… sort of. Transgender movie-based-on-the-book-Cabal, anyway.

Tonight, my housemates and I watched the 1990 horror cult classic Nightbreed.

Have you seen this one? Pretty good FX for the time, spectacular makeup, and strangely Canadian – being set in, and partly filmed in, Alberta. I was probably techincally too young the first time I saw it, but liked it even then.

Filmed in 1989 as it was, it was one of the last of the ’80s horror’ subgenre, but an unusual one. There’s a sleepy little town and outside it a necropolis of a graveyard; there’s a whole underground warren of monsters and a beleaguered population in fear of their lives; there’s a psychiatrist and a serial killer – except all of these common enough tropes were turned on their heads. The monsters lived in the graveyard, yes, but they are the beleaguered population; the serial killer is the psychiatrist who manipulates his disturbed patient into believing he, the patient, committed the crimes; and the ‘monsters’ aren’t the ones dealing out violence at their whim – that’s the police and the townspeople, at the behest of the soft-spoken well-dressed murderer with a doctorate.

As metaphors go, it’s not subtle – there’s a visible Star of David on a few of the prominent set pieces and props, for example, and they even called themselves the Lost Tribes at one point – but it works, and it doesn’t just work for that most obvious comparison. Even when I watched it when I was too young, I didn’t just feel for the ‘monsters’, the Midianites, I felt like one of them. Never quite part of the world, always treated like something they wanted to get rid of… and now?

Now that impression is all too real. Every single day I am exposed to message after message in the right-wing, right-leaning, and even centrist media, calling for people like me to be at best carefully managed and kept at arm’s length from society, or at worst outright exterminated. Within the last couple of weeks the Federalist even posted an op-ed literally using the phrase “the transgender question” to mean exactly what it sounds like, the dogwhistles so loud that wineglasses were shattering for miles around. We’ve seen cops who were quite a lot more politically extreme and trigger-happy than the ones in Nightbreed giving interviews about the precincts they run, and the ones in the movie reminded me deeply of the guys I see proudly bloviating online about what damage they’ll do to us if they catch us daring to use public facilities, sometimes in excruciating detail. The metaphor rings very true; we are what we are by accident of birth, not choice; we don’t want to hurt anyone; we look strange or uncanny, except (even more terrifying to those who hate us) those of us who can appear ‘normal’; and we are absolutely, utterly, not wanted by society.

This is not a deep cut. The metaphors here are subtle as a sledgehammer. The point here isn’t my amazing insight as a media critic, but rather how personal it feels now. This is a movie about monsters being murdered, and I see myself and my demographic in it, because the public calls us monsters and wants to murder us.

And while I know I’m not who the metaphor was intended to be about originally, Hebrew symbology aside, I’m pretty sure I’m not so very far off it. Nightbreed (and the novella it was based on) was written and directed by Clive Barker – a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic, who had just lived through the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.

I think perhaps he knew a thing or two about being treated like an underground monster deserving of death.